Gender Ad Remixer

What immediately stood out to me was the difference in audio use. The boys’ commercials featured lower, more gravelly voiceovers complimented by sharp sound effects like swords or guns while the girls’ commercials were often narrated by a soft-toned woman or very high and upbeat music and singing. The audio played into the stereotypes that the toys themselves reinforce. For the boys, the ads show off guns and battleships and other sorts of “manly” or “masculine” war-based toys, but the girls instead had dolls that encourage gender roles of motherhood or homemaking. Boys were soldiers, and girls cooks. I feel like I shouldn’t be surprised that these stereotypes are still forced on children, but I guess that I had hope that times were changing. Toys are a vital yet subtle mechanism of enforcing gender roles and leave huge impressions on children, and it feels absurd and wrong that we still practice genderized toys.

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